Microsoft GM, Hugh Aitken puts Reno Sparks community first

Microsoft Licensing's Aitken pushes for impact

May 4, 2012

Hugh Aitken is the general manager of Microsoft Licensing in Reno. / Tim Dunn/RGJ

Hugh Aitken vitaeHometown: Glasgow, Scotland Family: Wife, Audrey; one daughter; two sons; one stepson, two adopted daughters and five grandchildren Resume: General manager of Microsoft Licensing G.P. in Reno, and Americas Operations Center and Puerto Rico manufacturing facility, Microsoft Corp.; vice president, Oracle Corp.; various senior management positions, Sun Microsystems; chairman, Electronics Scotland; European logistics and material manger, Apollo computers; European distribution manager, Digital Equipment Corp. Business tips from Hugh Aitken• Listen to people. “Nine times out of 10, I learn an awful lot from people by paying attention to what they are saying.” • Ask people ‘why?’ six times usually gets you to the right answer. “By the time you get to the sixth ‘why’, you get the detail, depth and real answer.” • Have a compelling reason when selling an idea. “Don’t assume they get it the first time around.” • People are your greatest asset. “So, if your don’t invest in the right people and develop your people to the right level, you’ll never be a winner.” Only on RGJ.com• Visit RGJ.com for a video with Hugh Aitken, including his tips for business leaders.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

After Hugh Aitken was hired as head of Microsoft Licensing in July, he found one part of the operation that needed improvement — in the company’s impact on its Reno-Sparks community.

“Microsoft has been here for quite some time …,” Aitken said. “The community knows very little about Microsoft, and we can make a bigger impact by being more focused.”

As the general manager of the Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft subsidiary, Aitken narrowed the company’s varied community involvement to building better business relationships, expanding educational partnerships and improving philanthropic efforts.

The subsidiary in Reno is in charge of processing and ensuring compliance of all purchased Microsoft product licenses in North America and parts in Latin America. The site also houses the Fortune 100 company’s original equipment manufacturer and global credit and collection groups.

About 450 to 500 people work at the facility on Sierra Center Parkway. Half are employed by outsource provider, Arvato, which handles transactions for the company. About 85 percent of the employees are hired locally.

Aitken’s role as general manager of Americas Operations Center includes ensuring orders are processed in a timely fashion and overseeing multiple divisions, as well as the Reno location. He also manages a manufacturing facility in Puerto Rico, which produces discs for Microsoft products.

With more than 30 years in the international technology sector, he is hoping to implement his ideas in Reno.

Aitken, who is from Scotland, was deeply involved in a number of community efforts, including spearheading Electronics Scotland, an industry group that worked to develop better relationships with the government and high-tech companies and helped steer public policy, from 2000 to 2006 while he was at Sun Microsystems in Glasgow.

“I became the chairman of a technology forum, and I brought the top companies together — HP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Sun,” Aitken said. “We worked with the Scottish government to set the technology agenda.”

(Page 2 of 4)

The group worked on issues such as the need for more engineers to be educated at the local universities, easing business travel and shipping of goods. He hopes to establish a similar group in Nevada.

Aitken wants to gather the top 10 companies in the area to discuss issues related to living and working in Reno, including hiring, education and taxes. The group would have an agenda that could be shared with local government officials to improve business conditions.

He also wants to Microsoft to be part of Nevada’s economic development. He is offering to open up his facility to prospective investors to show multinational companies find the state attractive for business.

“I want everyone to feel proud of Reno,” he said. “And people are, I think, but I want them to even more proud of Reno. We want to give back to that, and I want Reno to be proud that they have Microsoft here.”

Eye on education

Microsoft’s newly focused path includes expanding the internship program with the University of Nevada, Reno.

Since 2008, Microsoft has had 44 UNR interns. It has hired many of them, but Aitken wants to double the number.

Aitken realized that students didn’t know about Microsoft products, including phones with its Windows operating system, XBoxes, Bing search engine and computer operating systems at the beginning of the internships.

“We need to get into the mind-sets of the 18,000 students at (UNR),” he said. “Any one of them could be the next developer of the next big software in the next few years. They need to know what Microsoft is all about and what the opportunities are. We need to make these opportunities happen for them and be a little more proactive about bringing them through here.”

Long-term plans still are in development. He’s considering holding business meetings at the university that would be open for students to attend, and to see how business decisions are made.

Community involvement

When Aitken first arrived, he found Microsoft licensing was involved in more than three dozen community activities. None made a large impact in the community. So, he hired a community relations manager to coordinate efforts. Long-time public relations professional Kerri Garcia began in April.

(Page 3 of 4)

One community fundraiser targeted is a golf tournament sponsored by the company.

He is looking to expand it, to bring in $100,000 a year to a children’s charity by asking the top 10 companies in the area to participate and contribute.

Aitken started a similar golf fundraiser in Scotland.

He raised more than 1.2 million English pounds, about $2 million, over 10 years for Scottish children charities. He brought professional golfers, celebrities and business associates to play at four different courses on the same day.

For his work in the technology sector and children charities, he was awarded the Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 2005. The honor is one level below being knighted.

But community work is not for the publicity or sales, he says.

“If you give back positively, you’ll get positive response from the community,” he said.

He also was involved in the foster system in Scotland, and earlier this year, he and his wife, Audrey, adopted two sisters ages 6 and 2 that the couple had been fostering for years.

If he had not landed this job or something similar, he would have worked with the Scottish social services, Aitken said

University of life

Aitken left school at 15 for a job delivering telegrams in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Every job that asked for qualifications, I just ignored it and applied anyway or I told them I had (no formal education),” he said. “You can say that I went to the university of life, and that was my education.”

He has a knack for identify inefficient processes, and it has helped him move through the logistics and supply chain divisions.

“It always annoyed me when things didn’t work the way properly the first time,” he said.

In more than two decades at Sun Microsystems, he worked his way up to senior management, ultimately becoming a vice president and manager of its manufacturing facility in Scotland. When Oracle Corp. acquired Sun in 2010, he stayed on for a year to complete closure of Scottish facilities and other projects.

(Page 4 of 4)

At the end of the year, he went looking for other opportunities.

Microsoft offered the most potential for him and the operational job attracted him, though he initially had reservations about living in Reno, he said.

Aitken had visited Reno for financing conferences for Sun Microsystemsm and the trips were limited to the downtown corridor. When he visited last July before accepting the job, he discovered another side of town.

“The relocation person took me around the whole area — the north, the south, the east and the west,” he said. “I loved it. I’ve never seen it in my life. It was July, and there was still some snow in the mountains. And every day is sunny - 320 days of sunshine. Coming from Scotland where every day is cloudy and rain, this was just magnificent.”

During the first couple of months, Aitken said he felt as if he was drinking from a fire hose as he got up to speed with all of Microsoft’s products and how they fit together.

“(Microsoft’s) got great products, but a vast array of products,” he said. “So, learning how the products work, what they do and how they join together has been challenging, but very exciting.”

The future

Aitken also will be helping guide Microsoft through the newest transition in technology — into the cloud.

“The cloud computing, that is coming over the next three years, is going to change the entire face of technology and change the way our company works and is organizing. The cloud is huge,” he said.

While Aitken noted that he’s excited to get to work each day, his other goal is to develop an internal successor to his position. Microsoft had to look to external candidate’s when Aitken’s predecessor Mary-Ellen Smith was promoted to corporate headquarters.

One of his strengths is developing teams and people, former Sun colleague and Electronic Scotland member Crawford Beveridge said.

“The amount of time he spent developing the other managers and vice presidents that work inside that (Sun) organization in Scotland was a huge contribution,” he said. “He left all of them understanding that it was important not just to do the day job, but do it in the context of good things for the community as well.”

As Aitken plans for the Microsoft’s future, retirement is not on his radar.

“The lucky thing for me is that what I’ve done over the last 30 years is what I’ve always wanted to do and thoroughly enjoyed,” he said.